Cellular telephones have become extremely popular with business and personal users. Customers usually purchase cellular telephones from a retail store or a cellular telephone network service provider. The telephones are manufactured by companies who generally do not own or control the retail stores and service providers that sell the cellular telephone to the customer who ultimately buys and uses the telephone. Once a cellular telephone manufacturer ships a telephone from its warehouse, the manufacturer loses control over the telephone and has no reliable way to determine when the telephone is sold to a consumer.
The manufacturers of cellular telephones conventionally provide a warranty with the sale of their cellular telephones. The warranty guarantees to consumer purchasers of the cellular telephone that the manufacturer will repair or replace the cellular telephone for a set period of time, such as one year, after purchasing the telephone. The warranty obligates the manufacturer to fix or replace telephones for a period of one year after the purchase.
Manufacturers of cellular telephones spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars each year to comply with warranty obligations by repairing or replacing broken cellular telephones. Cellular telephones that are returned during the warranty period are repaired or replaced by the manufacturer without charge to the customer. The manufacturer must absorb the cost of making repairs or replacements of cellular telephones that have become broken within their warranty.
Until now, manufacturers of cellular telephones have experienced difficulty in determining whether a telephone returned for repairs is under warranty or if its warranty is expired. Manufacturers need to know whether the warranty is still valid to know whether to repair or replace the cellular telephone for a fee or for free. To determine whether a returned cellular telephone is still under warranty, manufacturers have tried, with limited success, different methods and systems for tracking when a particular telephone was first sold to a customer. If they knew when the cellular telephone was first sold to a consumer, the manufacturer can readily determine when the warranty period expires for the telephone.
Manufacturers have had difficulty in implementing plans and methods for tracking the warranty period for individual cellular telephones. All too often, manufacturers replace or repair cellular telephones free of charge when the broken cellular telephone is no longer under warranty. There is a long-felt need by manufacturers of cellular telephones for a method to precisely ascertain the start date for the warranty period for each cellular telephone that they sell. If the start of the warranty period for each cellular telephone sold can be readily determined, then the manufacturer can determine whether a telephone returned for repair is under warranty.
In the past, manufacturers have attempted to determine when the returned cellular telephones have been placed into service to ascertain whether the returned phone is still under warranty. The past techniques for determining when cellular telephones have been placed into service are inadequate and inaccurate. Techniques for determining when telephones have been placed into service include estimating the date on which the telephone was sold to the consumer by knowing the date on which the telephone is manufactured and adding an average number of days between when telephones are manufactured and when they are sold to consumers. This estimating technique has the serious disadvantage that the average time that a phone dwells in the phone distribution chain, i.e., the average time between manufacture and retail sale, does not accurately predict when each individual telephone is actually sold to an end-use customer. For example, a cellular telephone upon being manufactured may be initially stored in the manufacturer's warehouse before being distributed to a retail store or to a distributor. If the telephone is sold by a manufacturer to a distributor, the distributor may have a warehouse for storing telephones before distributing the telephones to individual sales representatives or other retail stores. Depending on how quickly an individual distributor resells the telephones or a retail store sells telephones to end-use customers, a telephone may remain in warehouse storage for many months longer than the average time that phones typically spend in the retail distribution chain.
By estimating the warranty start date based on the manufacturing date plus an average time the telephone spends in the distribution chain will result in many instances where the warranty is miscalculated. If the miscalculation results in the manufacturer declaring the warranty period to be expired when the telephone is actually still under the warranty period, the customer will become angry when told that his/her broken telephone is no longer under warranty service, when in fact it is still within the warranty period. Similarly, other customers will receive a free repair or replacement of their telephone that is no longer under its actual warranty period, but the manufacturer estimates that the warranty period to be still in effect. Accordingly, estimating the warranty period based on the average time telephones dwell in distribution channels will generally result in angry customers and warranty repairs on telephones no longer under warranty.
Another conventional technique for determining when a warranty period begins for a cellular telephone is to request the customer to submit a proof or purchase date when returning the telephone for repair. A similar technique for establishing the warranty period is to request the customer to mail a warranty card to the manufacturer after purchasing the telephone. Retail customers are notoriously poor about mailing proofs of purchase regarding their telephone to manufacturers and about retaining proof of purchase documents for use when returning a telephone for a repair. A relatively low-percentage of new customers of cellular telephones mail the postcard warranty card included with the cellular telephone packaging to the manufacturer. In addition, some customers place a wrong date of purchase, or no date of purchase, on the warranty card which may unfairly extend the warranty period for their cellular telephone. Moreover, asking the customer to submit a proof of purchase date when returning a broken cellular telephone for repair causes the customer great anger at the manufacturer because customers generally do not have the requested proof of purchase and are angry that they cannot have their telephone repaired free of charge.
Accordingly, manufacturers have experienced disgruntled customers in attempting to estimate or determine the date on which the warranty period begins and ends for the cellular telephones that they make. To avoid irritating their customers, manufacturers have typically repaired or replaced telephones without charge even when the manufacturer strongly believes that a broken telephone is no longer under warranty. There is a long-felt, but unresolved need for a method of reliably and precisely determining when a warranty period starts and ends for a cellular telephone. Prior methods for establishing the warranty period of cellular telephones have not yielded satisfactory results.